


Scurry scurry

by SgtSalt



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Computer Viruses, Gen, Hallucinations, Post-Pacifist Best Ending (Detroit: Become Human), hank is connor's dad change my mind, rating may or may not go up, some slight horror elements if you squint but i'm trying to behave
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-12
Updated: 2018-07-12
Packaged: 2019-06-09 11:08:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,693
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15266208
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SgtSalt/pseuds/SgtSalt
Summary: Just two weeks after Markus' successful protest lead to Detroit being left alone for androids to gather freely in, a mysterious force is uploading ideas and images into android's minds, interrupting their daily lives. What's it trying to guide them towards?Also features: Connor struggles to integrate emotions and free will into the rest of his software. Markus struggles with balancing self-expression with being the face of the android resistance. North struggles to reconcile old instincts with new hopes. And Hank just...struggles.





	Scurry scurry

The rain is louder when Connor sits under the overhang for a bus stop. He doesn’t actually need to be out of the rain—he’s waterproof as long as his outer skin isn’t breached, and the fact that his blazer is soaked through doesn’t bother him—but something about the cold and wet and the pounding of it has him seeking out shelter. 

He doesn’t keep track of how long he sits at the bus stop, which is a surprise unto itself when he jerks back to awareness. What woke him up? How did he fall out of exact consciousness of his surroundings? Connor stands up and looks left and right. The rain obscures the scenery, but he can still see the street lamps in the distance. They’re just smears of color through the thick rain.

“Connor!”

Connor looks forward immediately. Old habits die hard, and besides, that sounded like— “Lieutenant?”

Lieutenant Hank does, indeed, appear to be in front of him. It’s Hank’s shaggy gray hair and beard that are illuminated more easily inside the dark car that he’s otherwise submerged in. Connor hasn’t ever had trouble recognizing a face before, and yet he still feels a very unusual need to reassess this information. 

“Connor, what the fuck are you doing out in a storm like this?”

It’s definitely Hank. “My outermost skin is waterproof, Lieutenant, and my temperature controls will hold very steady until I reach at least negative twenty degr—”

“Never mind the ‘I’m an android’ bullshit, what are you doing outside?” 

Connor doesn’t have an easy answer for that question. He doesn’t think he has an answer at all, in fact, and his opened mouth gradually closes. He feels something whirring too hard in his chest, probably trying to help direct power to figure out this newest puzzle that he can’t quite fathom. 

Hank lets the quiet—such as it is, with the rain streaming down all around them, a great loud sound that nearly has its own weight—sink in for a bit before he interrupts. “Well, get in.”

“Inside?” Connor asks, and turns to look behind himself. Perhaps he’d missed a convenience store.

“No, Connor— Are you serious? Inside _my car_.” 

Connor doesn’t move. The whirring inside one of his chest panels ratchets up. He catches his own reflection for a moment in the glass of the bus station and sees his LED cycling yellow. 

“Connor. Inside. C’mon, c’mon, I’m getting cold just _watching_ you.”

Connor’s legs move as if under someone else’s power, and yet he knows it’s all _him_ , now. He doesn’t have to listen to anyone else unless he wants to.

Which must mean he wants to listen to Hank. He does.

The passenger side door isn’t locked, although Connor has to catch a crumpled paper bag as it nearly falls out of the opened door. 

“Just shove everything to the side.” Suggests Hank, although getting into the seat requires a bit more work than just moving the mound of drink cups and plastic forks to the side. Connor collects as much as he can back into the paper bag he saved, and holds the entire stack of trash in his lap. The paper bag’s bottom is wet where it rests on his thighs. By the time Hank’s pulling away from the curb, Connor’s realized he should just put it on the floor of the car between his feet and hope for the best. 

“Here.” Hank shoves at the small vents in the front of the car, and Connor feels seventy-two degree air directed at his legs. “That’ll warm ya up.”

“Lieutenant, as I was saying, I can’t actually feel negative effects from low temperatures until about—”

“Connor?”

“Yes, Lieutenant?”

“Shut the hell up.”

Connor is, in fact, quiet for a moment. He watches the street lamps continue to streak by in the rain on the windshield. “Lieutenant?”

A heavy sigh. “Yeah?”

“Do you miss expecting me to obey you?”

Hank swears and the car comes to a heavier stop at the next intersection. “Do I—" Connor looks over, just in time to see the red light shine over Hank’s face. It’s twisted in a way Connor hasn’t seen often. He thinks it looks like guilt, though he isn’t entirely sure he can think of why. “Jesus, no. Connor, I wasn’t— Shit.” Connor just watches him. "Sorry." 

"I wouldn't be offended if you did, Lieutenant." 

"No? Well _I_ would be. Christ, we've been over this, Connor." The car's moving through the intersection now. Hank gestures in the space right next to his steering wheel. "We both know there's...really something _to_ all that. About androids being alive. Shit, it's been what, two weeks for you? Don't you feel different, after you went..." Hank's lips press together and to the side, his jaw setting. 

"Deviant?" Suggests Connor. 

"Nah, that word's no good anymore." Hank waves the idea away. "Sounds like somethin' bad, and I think we just spent a lot of police hours and a lot of news stories saying that it ain't." 

"'That word's no good anymore'." Connor repeats it, as if that will help sink the words into his system a little better. "I think...I like that assessment, Lieutenant." 

"Yeah? Well, get on it to come up with a new word, then." 

"I don't know if I'm the one to pick out a new word for my whole— species." 

"Well, I'm sure someone else'll come up with something, then." The silence that sinks between them feels tight, like it's tensed up to listen for the next opening. "Listen, Connor— Why were you outside, anyway?" 

Connor looks away from Hank to his own window, just in time to see his LED flashing yellow again. "I'm...not—" 

Connor cuts himself off, distracted by what he sees ahead of them through the rain-streaked windshield. He sits up straight, reaches instinctively over to Hank's wheel in case he needs to swerve them out of the way. "Lieutenant, stop!" 

The sound of brakes squealing is loud, even over the pouring rain. "Shit!" Hank yells to his left. Connor moves his hand to keep Hank's head from hitting his steering wheel, and Hank blinks over at him, pale and wide-eyed. "What the—" 

"Lieutenant— I don't think you hit it." Connor's already undoing his seatbelt, opening up his door. 

"Connor, what the fuck are you talking ab—" But Connor shuts the door behind himself, not wanting to get rain in Hank's car, and it cuts off Hank's voice. Connor's already standing in front of the car by the time Hank joins him outside. 

"Connor..." 

"It was right in front of your car, Lieutenant. I don't know _how_ you didn't hit it, at your speed it should have— But I don't see any impressions of a collision." Connor's touching the front bumper, wondering if his visual input is impaired by the rain. 

"Hit _what_ , Connor?" 

"The human in the road." Connor finally looks up at him. 

Hank's watching him with another, less-easily identified expression. It's not quite suspicion or sadness. Connor thinks it might be a blend of the two. He makes a mental note - literally - to research similar expressions later. Hank's brows nearly meet and his mouth keeps opening like he's going to talk, but can't think of the right words. 

"You didn't see anything?" It's hard to tell over the rain, but Connor thinks his voice has a tremor in it. Which doesn't make sense, given that it's not cold enough to affect his mechanical processes. Why does he feel like he's standing on uneven ground, then? 

"No, Connor." Connor doesn't like that sound in Hank's voice. It's a bit too soft. "Didn't see a damn thing, except you nearly running us off the road." 

"But I..." 

Hank's hovering two inches closer than he usually does. "Probably just hard to see with all this rain." 

"I—" Hank's watching him closely, but his face is turned towards his car. Connor thinks Hank is probably trying to hide the fact that he’s scrutinizing him. If Hank were an android, Connor is certain he’d be being scanned, right now. 

"Come on, Connor. Let's just...get back in the car." Hank pauses and then reaches out to tap his knuckles to Connor's shoulder. He starts back towards the driver’s side. "Now I really _am_ cold. Jesus, I can't believe you were just sitting around out here." 

Connor touches the front bumper one last time, looks right and left - nothing but rain hitting empty pavement, not even another car to be alarmed at Hank parked in the middle of the road - and then follows Hank into the car. 

*  
Jericho had been destroyed. The place, not the idea. 

Markus has spent a lot of the last few weeks, and to be fair the months of his life before, learning the importance of _ideas_ over perceived reality.

Still, it hadn’t seemed right to call the reclaimed Cyberlife warehouses _Jericho_. Instead, Markus is now sitting in the new android microcosm Hebron. The boundaries are...unclear. The peace with the humans is unclear. Markus’s world was thrown into shades of gray the moment he decided to fight back against Leo, and he’s ashamed to admit that sometimes, he misses the black and white of before.

But only sometimes. And not today.

Today, Markus had told everyone else involved in Hebron’s inner circle, the momentary de facto government of a new people, that he had to go into the rest of the city for supplies. _”I’ll be around later tonight. There’s just...something I need to check.”_

How else could Markus take the pulse of his new life, except by merging it with what deserved being remembered from his old one?

The canvas smells like - well, there's not a lot of words for _smells_ , are there? But it smells like Carl's house. Markus' old home. The _paints_ don't smell exactly the same, and Markus knows the exact chemicals that are missing or in greater quantities that make it look and feel different. But the colors are vivid and as they go on, there's a texture to them that Markus had eventually appreciated about Carl's paintings. It's a dimension that even the cleanest-programmed holographic billboard can't match.

He's in an upper story of the old Cyberlife warehouse. Underneath him, he knows the lower levels are buzzing with activity, working around the clock to convert the human's large-scale manufacturing into something smaller and more intimate. 

And, in the meantime, more focused on repairs. They need to fix the existing population before they can think about bringing even more of them into Hebron.

 _Close your eyes. Focus on the canvas._ That's another change from being free. Clearing his mind used to be as simple as obeying. Now it hums with all his worries. 

He prefers that, though. Just has to figure out the right balance for handling it. 

His brush touches the canvas again, light from the sunset filling his makeshift studio. 

And Markus lets go and paints. 

* 

"Lieutenant?" 

The morning after, rain’s still collected in puddles everywhere outside. It’s turned the remaining snow into slush. Detroit is unseasonably warm by eight degrees, compared to the last ten years of meteorological data. Regardless of the comparative warmth, it seems to still be cold enough that Lieutenant Hank prefers to wear two layers even indoors—an undershirt and a sweatshirt that says _Detroit Police Department_ in crackled, faded letters. Hank and Connor are both seated at Hank’s kitchen table, although Hank is the only one huddled over a mug of coffee.

"Hank." 

Connor blinks, LED cycling harder through its pale blue. "What?" 

"Hank. You keep— callin' me _Lieutenant_ , too. Don't have to." Hank's not looking at him, still staring at his computer. 

"Oh. Thank you, Lieutenant." Hank's eyes finally snap away from reading the news on his tablet, beady and irritated in an instant. "I suppose I'm just used to it. I like titles." 

Hank grunts. Connor compares it to the fifty-seven other recordings he has of that noise, and thinks it indicates begrudging agreement. "Suit yourself, then. Anyway— What were you saying?" 

"I was thinking about the question you asked me the other day, Hank." 

Hank is a few seconds too late to hide his smile at the name switch. "Yeah? Which one, I seem to need to ask you a lot of fuckin’ questions." 

"Why I was outside." 

"Hm." Hank seems to sense the mood changing, because this time, he turns the tablet’s screen off. "And what'd you come up with?" 

Connor finds that it's ever so slightly harder to come up with the words again, now that Hank is giving his almost-undivided attention. "Before I decided to become a deviant, I wasn't permitted to do anything outside of my mission. It wasn't in my programming. But that also means that I didn't _miss_ the ability to choose. It simply didn't exist as a possibility for me."

Hank's nodding, mouth a straight, thoughtful line just barely pulled down at the corners. "Musta been sort of...comforting. Being that confident about what to do." 

"Comforting. Yes, that's...an excellent word for it. Instead of choice, I had complete certainty in what to do. All that mattered was completing my mission." Connor's mouth stays open a moment, considering. "But now, I can... Come up with alternative ways of accomplishing tasks. Or even—" 

This is the part that took Connor so long to understand. He leans his forearms on his side of the table, tilts further over it. Hank instinctively mirrors him. Connor's voice is a whisper: "Or even _not accomplish a task_." There is, abruptly, an urge to smile. The sort of conspiring smile that Connor's seen Hank give his burger-vendor friend. He can feel it unevenly triggering his holographic skin to comply. "I just— felt thoughtful. So I went outside. It was a _pointless_ activity, Hank. I just thought it would help me think. So I did it." There's a light, vibrating sensation in Connor's chest, although he doesn't think any of his biocomponents are malfunctioning. 

Hank stares at him and then chokes out a laugh. "Well, Connor. I'm glad you learned _something_ from me." He reaches across the table, taps his knuckles to Connor's shoulder like he did outside in the rain. "Wouldn't have guessed it would be sulking outside, but I'll be damned if you don't look thrilled about it." 

"I think I might be, Hank." Experimentally, one joint whirring into movement at a time, Connor reaches across the table himself. Hank only barely gets out a _"What—"_ before Connor's closed fist makes gentle contact with Hank's shoulder. 

Hank laughs again. 

*

"This is what you've been up to all day?" Markus turns around, still standing at the edge of one of the large floor-to-ceiling windows, and watches North step off the elevator. She's approaching his paintings. 

"I needed to think everything over." His lips purse. Not quite right. "Or _stop_ thinking, I guess. Clean slate for new ideas." 

"And this helps?" North sounds genuinely interested, like it's a foreign concept that she hasn't written off yet because it's so new. She's stepped up beside the latest one and reaches one hand out, stopping short of touching the canvas. This is the only one still in the lone easel Markus had brought upstairs. The rest are behind the easel, carefully leaning against each side of the table that's holding Markus' paints. 

"I didn't know if it would. That's why I tried it." 

"Well, _did_ it?"

Markus hesitates. He's never really _not_ been honest, even if he's not as blunt as North. "I think so. Most of them did." He watches North look at the first painting balanced against the table, still hovering without reaching out for them. "You can touch them. If you want. The paint's still a bit wet on some of them, though." As if she can't also see the telltale shine that Markus can. 

She does, though, very lightly tracing a finger along a dried patch that makes up the sky at the top. "It's the view out that window." 

"Yeah. It took me a few tries to move into painting things that weren't literally in the room with me." 

He watches North move around to the next painting. There's something in her expression that feels more like a— memory. Not his own memory, either. Markus wonders if he'd _felt_ that emotion from her when they'd connected for the first time. 

"Did your old master train you to paint?" 

The question hits like a punch to the solar plexus, right against his pump regulator. Markus takes a slow breath in and out. "My _dad_ did, yeah." Is just faintly shaky, walking the edge between angry and soft. Markus can't bring himself to say anything else for a while, not while North's face is so unreadable. She sounded - and looks - angry, but there's more there. There's _always_ been more there. "And he was only my master _before_ I woke up." 

"How can you be sure he doesn't _want_ to still be your master now? How can you trust him?" More anger, but now North's voice cracks, her eyes feverish but cheeks dry. She stalks over in front of another painting, frowns at it. 

Markus slowly circles around the table to her side. 

"Look," she interrupts as Markus opens his mouth. She holds out a hand at him as if to physically shush him, but again, doesn't actually touch. Never without permission, Markus is starting to realize. "I know. He treated you _differently_. But how did—" Her eyes are stuck on Markus' painting. Markus doesn't even glance at it, just stares at her. His chest feels just as tight, just as tender as earlier. At least two of his biocomponents are currently working at too high of an energy level. "How did he _know_."

That's not the argument Markus was thinking they were about to have. A wrinkle forms between his brows and he takes a step forward, checking himself before reaching over. "What do you mean? Know what?"

North's eyes reflect too much light, glassy with unshed tears. Her whole face is set angrily, jaw tight. "Know that you weren't just a machine."

"I don't..." Markus feels even less sure of where he's trying to guide any of this.

"What was _different_ about him? Or was it you?" North is suddenly very close, turned on one heel to him. "Was there just something wrong with the _rest_ of us, that no one ever realized _we_ were alive?"

"North, I—"

"Connor had Hank recognize what he was before _he_ even knew." North's already turned away, arms crossed. The tears have started tracking down her face, though Markus thinks that's only because of how her expression contorted in anger a moment ago. "You had Carl. Maybe the rest of us just didn't..." That's where the steam runs out, though. That's when her energy fragments before Markus' eyes. 

Very, very slowly, he puts a hand on her shoulder. "I don't think it had anything to do with anyone deserving to be woken up more than someone else. I think all it had to do with was the humans we happened to be near. It was just chance, North." He hesitates. "Besides, that means you and the others who didn't have anyone— that means they woke themselves up. You were strong enough to know what you were worth all on your own."

North breathes out hard, shaky but centering, and she looks away while putting her own hand on top of Markus'. "Guess that's a good way to look at it."

The silence gathers in all the microscopic spaces between Markus' joint cases. It aches. "You don't really believe in fate like that anyway, do you, North?"

"No." Saying that seems to release some of the pressure. North lets go of Markus' hand in favor of wiping her cheeks off with her hands. It's not very absorbent, seeing as it's plastic on plastic. "Oh, come on—" She shoves at Markus' shoulder, a smile flickering across her face and catching light in her eyes, but she takes the paper towel he's offered her from off the art supply table. 

"Better than your hand." 

"Uh-huh." 

They both just stand there, shoulders touching, still both facing forward. North takes one last deliberate breath. It's a tic that not all of them share - none of them need to breathe - but Markus has done it himself. It's part of the subroutines that make them seem animated, human. Now that they're deviant, it's...centering. 

Or he _hopes_ it is, for North. North, who's pulled away from him with one last, quick squeeze to his hand. She's circled around to the third painting. "Learned to paint what wasn't literally in the room with you, huh." 

"What? Oh, that one." Markus follows North over to it. 

"A laboratory?" 

"I guess so." Markus' brow furrows. He doesn't think he's ever felt quite this before - unbalanced, a bit embarrassed for no objective reason. Hesitant to share. 

North looks away from the painting to examine him, instead. "It's good, it's just a bit...eerie. Was it cathartic?" 

Markus' face twists in consideration, mouth open for a few moments before he responds. "Yes? Sort of. I just felt— compelled to paint it."

"Have you seen this place before?" 

Markus stares at it with North now. He shrugs, a slow movement that can't dismiss it as well as he'd like. "No. No, I haven't. It just...came to me, I guess. I just saw it in my mind." 

North looks at him, hard and scrutinizing. In the end her gaze relaxes in a way that makes Markus deeply aware that he’s being intentionally spared another probing question. "That's what art's supposed to be like, I guess.” 

"That's what Carl described it as." 

"Guess you're onto something, then." And North squeezes his hand again, moving past him. Back towards the elevator. 

Markus turns and follows her, sparing just one more backwards glance to the painting of the place that came to him as clearly and as unmistakably as a direct message from another Hebron member. 

Maybe he'd just heard it from one of them, after all.

**Author's Note:**

> This will be a multi-chapter fic, with changing character perspectives. It's mostly to explore everyone adjusting to having emotions after going deviant (focus will be on Connor & Hank's friendship/found family), but I can't just write about detective characters and NOT have some sort of mystery element to it. More characters/tags will be added as more fic is uploaded. I'll probably update about once a week!


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